A Literary Magazine in Support of the Jewish Community
The Lute Man of Theresienstadt
"Wherever people are, music is. Even in the darkest places, it finds a way."
—Viktor Ullmann, composer and prisoner of Theresienstadt
They say he played at dusk, when even the guards grew tired of silence. His lute, smuggled in beneath a sack of onions, was small, cracked near the neck, but his hands, once meant for carpentry, now for elegy, brought sound back into the camp like someone pouring water where there had only been dust. He sat near the latrine wall or beside the soup line, uninvited and unafraid. His music had no lyrics, only longing. Each note seemed to press against the fences as if asking, Is it still possible? To remember joy? To breathe something other than fear? No one spoke while he played. Even the children stopped chewing. There was one afternoon when it rained, and the strings hissed with every drop, and an old woman cried, not because of the rain, but because the tune reminded her of Lublin, of a wedding she attended in ’28, where a man with the same fingers played “Eli, Eli” like he meant every syllable. He never told his name. He became myth before he became ash. Some say he was once a music teacher; others say he was a thief who stole the instrument from a museum before they took him in Prague. One boy remembered how the lute was missing its fifth string, yet somehow the melodies still felt complete, as if sorrow itself was the hidden note that tied everything together. When the trains came, and the ghetto thinned like breath in winter, the lute went silent. People searched for it afterward, beneath blankets, in the creases of barracks, inside the walls where men hid crusts of bread and folded letters. No one found it. But sometimes, when it’s very cold, and your hands are too numb to pray, you might hear a whisper of him in the wind, a run of notes stitched into the sky. He was not famous. He saved no one. And yet his music made a hole in despair large enough for a little hope to pass through. And that, they say, was a kind of resistance too.
Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri
Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri is a Black poet and prose writer from Ghana. A Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and BREW Poetry Award nominee, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Transition Magazine, The Malahat Review, Colorado Review, Chestnut Review, Orion Magazine, A Long House, Protean Magazine, The Adinkra Projects, Flash Fiction Magazine, NENTA Literary Journal, The Poetry Lighthouse, Lotus-Eater Magazine, Twin Flame Literary, and elsewhere. He is the first-place winner of the 2025 African Writers Award for Poetry, a finalist for the Adinkra Poetry Prize, and the fourth runner-up for the African Literary Prize. He was recently longlisted for the Renard Press Poetry Prize and is an Obsidian Foundation Fellow. Find him on Instagram @poetraniel.
